CHAPTER 15 – WHAT HE DID TO YOU
1244 Words
LAYLA'S POV
The blinds in Thea's clinic are drawn again, and the image of Eli's shaking hands and the heat of his body against mine is still burning through me when I sit down and see her face.
She's sitting. Thea doesn't sit.
"Close the door."
I close it. She slides the folder toward me and opens it, and the way her hands move makes my chest tighten before she speaks.
"The compound I flagged in your first panel. I identified it." She pauses. "It's wolfsbane."
"That's not possible. I've never been exposed to wolfsbane."
"The levels in your blood say otherwise. They're not residual traces from a single exposure – they're chronic. Sustained over months." She taps the page. "This is consistent with regular ingestion. Small doses, repeated over a long period of time."
"I would have noticed. Wolfsbane has a taste-"
"Not in small enough doses. Mixed into something strong – coffee, a heavily spiced meal – you wouldn't detect it."
The word "coffee" hits me like a physical blow.
Coffee. Garrett made my coffee every morning. Every single morning for two years. He'd have a cup waiting on the counter before I was even out of bed, and I used to stand in the kitchen holding it with both hands thinking this is what love looks like. A man who makes you coffee before you ask.
"How long are we talking?"
"Based on the concentration levels – months." She watches my face carefully. "Sustained wolfsbane at these levels would suppress a wolf gradually. The host would experience it as slow weakening. Fatigue. Difficulty shifting. Until eventually–"
"Until eventually you can't shift at all."
I'm whispering and I don't know when I started whispering.
I think about the months before the fight. How tired I was. How heavy my body felt. How I'd come home from work and collapse on the couch and Garrett would say "you're probably just overworked, baby" and hand me another cup of coffee. Another cup. Another dose. Another morning of my wolf getting quieter while I thanked him for being thoughtful.
"I thought I lost my wolf in the fight. Defending him."
"The fight may have been the final trigger. But your wolf was already dying. Had been for a long time." Thea leans forward. "Whoever did this had daily access to something you consumed without question."
I'm not looking at her anymore. I'm looking at my hands in my lap and I'm seeing my kitchen. The counter. The mug with the chipped handle that I loved because Garrett bought it for me at a flea market on our third date. The steam rising from the coffee that was always ready. The lamb I cooked every week with his mother's recipe – spiced heavily enough to mask anything.
Every morning. Every single morning I sat across from that man and drank what he gave me and told him I loved him and he watched my wolf die by inches and said "you're my whole world" and poured me another cup.
"He made my coffee." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Every morning. He always had it ready."
Thea doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
"He was poisoning me." I say the words and they come out flat because the feeling behind them is so large it can't fit through my throat. "My husband was poisoning me while we ate breakfast together."
The room tilts. I grip the armrests of the chair.
He was poisoning me while I folded his laundry. While I learned his mother's recipes. While I practiced saying "you're going to be a father" in the bathroom mirror. While I gave up my seat at Iron Howl because I thought love was worth more than power. While I defended him in a fight that took the last of a wolf he'd already been killing for months.
I was losing myself slowly, in my own kitchen, from the hands of the man I chose over everything. And I was smiling at him the entire time.
"Can it be reversed?"
"I don't know yet. This duration of sustained poisoning is rare." Thea's voice is gentle in a way that almost breaks me. "I need to research it. But Layla – keep this between us. I mean it."
I nod. I thank her. I walk out.
I make it to my room. Lock the door. Call Harper.
She listens without interrupting. I lay out every piece – the wolfsbane, the timeline, the coffee, the concentration levels, the fact that my wolf didn't die in battle, it was murdered in a kitchen by a man who kissed me goodbye every morning and watched it happen.
When I finish, her end of the line is silent for so long I check that the call is still connected.
Then her voice comes through – terrifying in its calm. "I'm going to kill him."
"Not yet."
"Layla–"
"Not yet, Harper." My voice breaks on her name and I press my hand over my mouth because if I start crying I'm not going to stop. "I need to use this. When the time is right."
She's quiet. Then: "Okay. Tell me when."
After she hangs up, I sit on the edge of my bed and the grief I've been holding back arrives all at once.
I replay every "I love you" he ever said to me. Every "you're my whole world." Every "I'd never hurt you." The metallic taste floods my mouth on every single one – not in real time but in memory, my body retroactively confirming what my heart spent two years refusing to see.
He said "you're my everything" while my wolf was dying.
He said "I'd never let anything happen to you" while he was the thing happening to me.
He said "drink your coffee, baby, it's getting cold" and I drank it. Every morning. I drank it because I loved him and I trusted him and I thought the man who made you coffee before you woke up was the kind of man who would never hurt you.
I was wrong. I was so catastrophically wrong that the wrongness of it fills my entire chest and pushes against my ribs until I can't breathe.
I cry. Not the controlled kind. The ugly kind – the kind where my face is in my hands and my shoulders are shaking and snot is mixing with tears and I don't care because nobody can see me and I have earned this. I have earned every ugly sound coming out of me right now.
When it stops – not because the grief is finished but because my body runs out of fuel – I sit in the silence and wipe my face and pick up my phone.
The voice memo app opens. The first recording is there – entry one, the night I arrived. I don't play it.
I hit record.
"Entry two. What he did to you."
My voice is different from the first recording. Steadier. Lower. Not shaking. I document everything – the compound, the timeline, the daily ingestion, what it means for my wolf, what it means legally, what it means for a custody case against a man who chronically poisoned his wife.
When I hit stop, I sit in the silence. Then I open a new memo.
"What I'm going to do about it."
I stare at the wall. And I start talking.
- Writer
